


this old heart of mine (is weak for you)

by captainkilly



Category: Daredevil (TV), The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: F/M, Fluff and Angst, Karen Page is a mess, also smut -- if you squint, some refs to death and drugs -- if you squint, this is just two people needing each other really
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-29
Updated: 2019-09-29
Packaged: 2020-11-07 18:44:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,637
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20822060
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/captainkilly/pseuds/captainkilly
Summary: He walks back into her life and all she can think is "this isn't fair".





	this old heart of mine (is weak for you)

**Author's Note:**

> It's been a long while, but I can't stay away from this ship.. so here is a small piece of their love once more. Title for this fic is lifted from the song by the same name.

*****

_The years have changed him, _she thinks. He carries himself less tightly, as though the coil in his chest has unwound and loosened with the passage of time. He’s not drawn like a bowstring now – before, a mere breath from her had been enough to set loose the arrows. She wonders, dimly, what will injure her now. If his laugh is still going to be the sharp note amid the huff of breath, if his smile will still be uncertain of being real at all, if his fingers still tap out the rhythm of a trigger that pulses in sync with her own breath. If she’ll still _hurt_, when it’s all done.

His eyes meet hers. Something bubbles in her chest – pops, fizzes, spirals – and she clenches her hands into fists.

_Well, _her mind supplies, _shit_.

*****

He still needs to keep his hands busy. He fidgets with the wrapper of the biscuit that came with their order. There’s the coffee itself, of course, and his nose still scrunches up when he takes a sip. His eyes still dart from the door to the windows and to her before they turn inward into a place where only darkness goes.

She categorizes all the things that haven’t changed since their last meeting. It anchors her to know that his boots still brush against her leg when he leans forward, that his face still sports the remnant of a bruise, and that he still mumbles when he is not entirely sure of how she is going to take what he says. She responds to his attempts at conversation, but knows later she will not recall a single word other than her name.

He says her name uncertainly at first, as if his tongue has grown unused to the sound. _Did I never roll off your lips in a half-stumble? _she almost asks, reckless and so very personal as has become her habit, _Did you never gasp my name between this breath and the next the way I did yours, the way my tongue caressed the idea of you? _His eyes darken as she responds with laughter to the sound of her name, and she thinks _good_ more viciously than she would ever confess to.

*****

She thinks she’s about to go insane.

Matt can smell the night air on her skin. She can tell by the way his nose wrinkled earlier while she handed him his coffee. There’s disapproval in the set of his shoulders. She wonders if he can distinguish the traces of gunpowder or the iron stench of blood that ran havoc in the dark. Sometimes, she wishes that death wouldn’t cling to her skin, her hair, her clothes so casually as though they have never been apart.

It’s a stupid wish. She wanted this. Wanted the night, wanted _him_.

_As though you never left me, _she almost texts, fingers hammering away on the too-tiny keypad before she erases and leaves it be again, _as though you’re entwined in my very soul and I can’t keep you out_.

*****

“Karen,” he says, and his voice is an anchor.

Her breath hitches in her throat, dies in her chest, never reaches her belly. She inhales noisily, through mouth and nose, and splutters against the feeling of too little oxygen getting drowned in the flood of her brain. There’s blood on her hands. There’s blood on her hands. There’s blood under her fingernails, there’s blood on her wrist as though she’s spattered paint across the canvas of her skin, there’s blood in her hair and it’s red again the way it was after Kevin – after Kevin – after..

“Karen, hey,” he hushes, “c’mere.”

His breath is warm. His hands are never a vice-like grip on her body, but his eyes are as tight as she’s ever seen. There’s blood on his face, and hardness in the shield his chest is encased in. She thinks she should get a shield like that. Anything to keep her heart from rising into her throat and creating the poisonous bile that’s threatening to push back the worst of the fog that’s entered her brain since this morning.

“I feel sick,” she slurs, warns, heaves. Splutters out the evidence of her most recent failing. Her tongue is black with chemicals and her mind only forms the shape of Kevin. “I can’t, I can’t..”

“Yeah, you can,” he says.

She almost believes him.

*****

She’s too scared to ask when he’ll leave.

He’s folded himself into the space she created for herself a little too neatly. There’s coffee on her bedside table every day when she wakes. There are scrambled eggs and little bread rolls that look too wonky to have made it out of a bakery. There is the pile of letters that he sorts into neat and smaller doses. There is new shampoo, an extra toothbrush by the sink, and her best towels are softer than she’s ever felt.

_When are you going away? _she demands as he smiles at her. Then, deeper still, the confusion. _Why are you not going?_

He struggles with the night more than she does. She pads over to the chair he has insisted on commandeering when his breathing goes uneven and too shallow to be natural. Her hand wraps around his before she can even reconsider it. Her breath flits across his skin as she sinks down on the floor next to him and leans her head against his legs.

They wake like this almost every morning.

He never says a word about it.

*****

The first time he comes into her bed is the first time she wakes screaming in a cold sweat and with terror clawing at her eyes and heart and belly. It threatens to tear her apart where her skin is softest, leaving jagged marks of spilled life in its wake. She can’t crawl back to herself fast enough and he is there with her before she can warn him to stay away.

It would be easier if he was full of judgment like all the other men she knows. _Oh Karen, you break everything you touch. Oh Karen, don’t be silly. Oh Karen, you’re better than this. _She knows those patterns like she knows herself. Small, stupid, spiteful Karen. Breaking the world to mirror her own broken heart. Demanding that she be allowed to fix everything back up with glue – better than she found it, yeah, can’t you see?

She thinks she’s going to scream again when all he says is “oh, Karen” and fills those words with more warmth than she deserves.

The kiss against her temple sends her keening, wailing, crying into the mattress. Sends her into his arms, into the stronghold that sings to her of home. She clings to him in equal measures of shame and hope.

_Don’t go, _she prays, _please don’t go._

If she says it out loud, he never answers.

*****

The sky is heavy with rain.

She can smell the storm in the air before the first lightning crashes into the water.

“Hey,” he says.

“Hey,” she returns.

He scrapes his throat. “Look,” he starts, then shakes his head. “Kar–”

“I know.” She laughs. “You’re going.”

Pain sets into his jaw and sears his eyes with something that’s entirely too bright for her. She looks away. Looks at the lightning that jags across midnight blue and wonders if she can level the landscape inside his soul the way the bolts crash onto the water below.

His voice is soft behind her. “I thought you needed me to.”

A laugh escapes her. Derisive, demanding. It wrenches itself out from between her lips before she can wish him goodbye. “What I need has nothing to do with it.” She wishes it didn’t sound as bitter as the black coffee he insists on drinking.

She thinks it’s rather fitting that it does.

Her hands come to rest on the kitchen counter.

The lightning outside flashes against her eyes.

“Am I wrong, Karen?”

“Am I right, Frank?” she asks, then, and her mouth curves downward once she realizes good and well what she’s asking him.

“No,” he says then. “Not this time.”

*****

Her name rolls off his tongue differently when it’s uttered between one hissed breath and one sigh. She catalogues this the way she does everything else about him, as though she is drawing a map of him inside of herself. There’s a sharp twang of coffee and blood that curls into her nose and takes up residence on her skin with every time his weight shifts on top of her and his hands press down on her wrists.

They fit just right, in the end. Her toes come to rest just behind his knees, her back arches until his arm slips beneath it and holds her upright, her nails are at the back of his neck and his voice resides in her ear long enough to keep her steady. There is warmth that burns her skin as though she is the one who has been struck by lightning, but the jagged quality of his breath leads her to believe her heart isn’t the only thing that’s beating out the pace of thunder.

She smiles against his shoulder, against his hair, against his face when they shift and change in unison. He kisses her like a drowning sailor lured into the water by the promises of a mermaid. She kisses back until she tastes salt on his lips and drowns with him.

The white flag in her mind is burning.

_I surrender_, she keeps saying. _I give in. Stay, stay, stay._

*****

She wakes to dark eyes and a hand on her waist.

“I need you, too,” he murmurs into the air between them. “I do.”

Her fingers clench around his wrist until she’s sure it hurts. Her thoughts are wild.

_I need you more._


End file.
